FILE 00127KI did not lose faith in open AI, open science, or decentralized infrastructure. I lost faith in the assumption that every important coordination problem deserves an investable token. That was the economic reckoning. Then five mornings at Stratford added the political one: every registered claim has an owner, the owner takes sides in an emergency, and the strongest monetary-economics argument of the decade — Alden's — quietly assumes the emergency never comes. This is the essay the authoritarianism series kept promising: what a bearer asset is actually for.
FILE 00226KIf Bitcoin had existed in 1929, it would have helped some people preserve wealth outside failing banks and hostile borders. It would not have saved most Americans from destitution, because most of the damage came through unemployment, foreclosure, and demand collapse. But if a Depression of that scale hit today, the rails are already in the ground, and a cypherpunk household could do things no 1933 family could imagine.
FILE 00321KCrypto was born from a radical vision of privacy and liberation. Decades later, it's become synonymous with fraud, political corruption, and memecoins. A deep dive into the cypherpunk origins, the betrayal of those ideals, and what it would take to reclaim them.
